First define death with measurable metrics on the human body. No where in this entire thread have you done so.
this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2026
17 points (87.0% liked)
Atheism
5524 readers
223 users here now
Community Guide
Archive Today will help you look at paywalled content the way search engines see it.
Statement of Purpose
- This is a support and conversation community for people who don't believe in gods.
- Superstition hucksters have no reason to subscribe or post here at all.
- If you are looking to debate or proselytize, options will be linked lower in the sidebar.
Acceptable
- Honest questions or conversations.
- Discussions on parenting or advice.
- Struggles, frustrations, coming out.
- Atheist memes. We can have fun!
- News headlines relevant to atheism.
Unacceptable
Depending on severity, you might be warned before adverse action is taken.
- Anything against site rules.
- Illegal and/or NSFW material.
- Troll posts and comments. There will be no attempt to explain what that means.
- Leading questions, agenda pushing, or disingenuous attempts to bait members.
- Personal attacks or flaming.
Inadvisable
- Self promotion or upvote farming.
- Excessive shitposting or off-topic discussion.
Application of warnings or bans will be subject to moderator discretion. Feel free to appeal. If changes to the guidelines are necessary, they will be adjusted.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathizer or a resemblant of a group that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of any other group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you you will be banned on sight.
Provable means able to provide proof to the moderation, and, if necessary, to the community.
~ /c/nostupidquestions
If you want your space listed in this sidebar and it is especially relevant to the atheist or skeptic communities, PM DancingPickle and we'll have a look!
Connect with Atheists
- Matrix: #atheism:envs.net
Help and Support Links
- Freedom From Religion Foundation
- The Secular Therapy Project
- Secular Students Alliance
- Black Nonbelievers
- The Clergy Project
- Atheist Alliance International
- Sunday Assembly
- Atheist Ireland
- Atheism UK
- Atheists United
Streaming Media
This is mostly YouTube at the moment. Podcasts and similar media - especially on federated platforms - may also feature here.
- Atheist Debates - Matt Dillahunty
- Rationality Rules
- Friendly Atheist
- Making Sense with Sam Harris
- Cosmic Skeptic
- Genetically Modified Skeptic
- Street Epistemology
- Armored Skeptic
- NonStampCollector
Orgs, Blogs, Zines
- Center for Inquiry
- American Atheists
- Humanists International
- Atheist Republic
- The Brights
- The Angry Atheist
- History for Atheists
- Rationalist International
- Atheist Revolution
- Debunking Christianity
- Godless Mom
- Atheist Freethinkers
Mainstream
Bibliography
Start here...
...proceed here.
- God is Not Great (Hitchens)
- The God Delusion (Dawkins)
- The End of Faith (Harris)
- Why I Am Not a Christian (Russell)
- Letter to a Christian Nation (Harris)
Proselytize Religion
From Reddit
As a community with an interest in providing the best resources to its members, the following wiki links are provided as historical reference until we can establish our own.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
death is the cessation of all biological function. this process leads to a permanent and irreversible nonexistence.
So everycell or 1 cell or 500000 cells. What about the microbiome. How many spe iese of bacteria must remain or be gone. No what you have there is not a measurable metric on the human body.
we don’t know. i am not stating otherwise. something makes clinical death possible and it mimics death in a detectable sense. but the process of death reaches an irreversible point where total functionality ceases.
You may also be fighting history. We have definitions of death, and have had them throughout all history. But now we understand death is a process, and we are sometimes able to Intervene, even when people have passed the milestones historically associated with irreversible death.
Or you’re fighting practicality. You can detect whether or not a heart is beating, even without technology, and that is usually part of the death process. But medical technology will continue to improve, leading to possible interventions later in the process. You have a moving target. How can you even tell when all cells are finally irreversiblydead? This logic leads to the silly extrapolation of not being dead until after you’re cremated
i don’t know when they’re irreversibly dead lol. that’s the point. we don’t know how to guarantee death has occurred. this doesn’t mean it isn’t a moment in the process, it means we can’t detect when it happens. irreversible biological death has never been reversed, period.
Its not a matter of knowing. Its a definition of metrics. Youre not stating metrics. Youre stating an unfounded opinion based on intuition. Who says its irriversable. Just becuse we dont know how doesnt mean something is impossible.
it is observed as irreversible. i don’t feel the need to hold off speaking in absolutes here.
Your argument hinges on death being irreversible, but you also dismiss all (potential) examples of "resurrection" with "well, you weren't really dead then, huh?".
Anyway, a near-death experience doesn't even require an actual death, medical or otherwise. Now, would you see "beyond the grave" when you're only mostly dead? Probably not, no, I don't see why we should trust any of those accounts. But they're still interesting experiences to hear about, they're pretty rare and maybe we can learn something about the edges of life from them.
biological death is irreversible. clinical death is not. calling both "death" is a misnomer and confusing. i dislike it. clinical death is a term used for when it really really really really really seems like somebody is dead. clearly, they weren't really dead if they came back to life. biological death is not reversible at this point in time or even as far as we know.
probably not, no
lol probably? how about absolutely. because that implies we could get there while alive. not really an afterlife is it?
Yeah, but see, you're just arguing definitions again. If it's irreversible by definition, then of course it's impossible to get back from it. But for all we know (and can detect), it's possible to be in a state that is indistinguishable from "true death" (at least for a moment) and return to a state of life. So you can't say with absolute certainty that those people weren't truly dead, you can only argue after the fact based on your definition of "true death".
And the same with "afterlife": if they weren't "truly dead" they couldn't be in the afterlife when it's defined as "the place you're in when you're truly dead", but the afterlife would be completely unfalsifiable by that definition anyway, so who cares. They were in some state indistinguishable from death and still experienced something, call it what you want.
Again, I'm not saying NDEs prove the existence of heaven or whatever, but they are experiences people have when they're super-duper close to death and that's interesting. Is it the desperate hallucinations of dying neurons? Still interesting. So when you ask "why listen to these people when they're clearly making shit up", I answer "you can also make shit up if you're clinically dead for a minute, I still want to hear it".
it isn't irreversible by definition. i am stating it is irreversible. death is the cessation of all biological function and this has never been reversed in human history.
it's possible to be in a state that is indistinguishable from "true death"
yes, and that would be.. a state, not death. indistinguishable is describing our ability to detect a difference, not the mechanics being absolutely identical. they are still separate processes.
i'll give you that on "afterlife." i have a point to make but it might just be something that annoys me personally and not worth getting into lol.
Funnily enough a lot of people who take DMT (the chemical your brain absolutely FLOODS with when your body is close to death) speak about being in another dimension, about how time dilates and the ten minute trip feels like hours.
Now I'm not saying that people who experience near death are conflagrating tripping such absolute balls that reality has slipped away from them with being in some form of afterlife... But.
And I think it's not even controversial, how a brain will start to halluciate once normal operation ceases. All you can tell by near-death experiences is, that a brain is a biological thing and subject to biological, chemical and electrical processes. But that shouldn't really come as a surprise to anyone.
Works the same way with everything. If I mess with my computer or electrical devices, they're gonna glitch as well. Or crash and try to restart, which is a thing a computer can do unless the hardware is damaged.
Right! A surge of DMT. The reports of afterlife stuff is basically people talking about the weird dream they had after their brain ceased normal function for a short period.
What does the computer experience when I angrily unplug it from the wall?
Your argument is based on a false premise — there are absolutely documented cases of people being dead in hospital settings who were revived.
This is completely false.
The difficulty is in correctly determining death, not that death has occurred and then was reversed. One of the causes is even “missing weak vital signs”, so the error is human.
Cool. I hope you understand I’m going to rely on the NIH’s definition of death more than some rando on Lemmy.
Dude you are still missing the basic philosophical premise of OP's post regardless of how you want to define "death". Also, I'm not sure if you're trolling or what's going on, but let me try to explain a thought I had prompted by this post also: For a religious person who claims to see God briefly after they "die" seems strange to me simply because their god would already know that they were going to be revived in mere seconds. Feels like these people think that they unlocked a hack or a way to cheat the system into seeing the afterlife, and obtaining evidence of god existence, in a way that goes around god's big plan or whatever. Almost seems sacrilegious to suggest if you are a believer, right?
okay well i suggest you reread that article because it talks about limitations being able to detect death lol. it even mentions early that modern tech has reduced errors but not completely eliminated them.
Yes. And these are definitions and words. They get defined for various applications. I don't think there's a single "true" definition of "death", not by the NHS, nor by anyone else. Someone can be dead per law, someone can be dead enough but you'll still perform CPR on them. Or their head is missing and they're really dead and you don't do CPR. Other people still have vital signs and they're so dead the doctors will remove their liver, kidneys and heart and transplant it to somebody else... There's just several definitions of the word. So yes. Sure, per some definition people can be dead and then be resurrected. But that's just a definition thing, not a real concept. It's a bit weird to have non-permanent death, if you ask me. It's useful for certain things to phrase it like that. But how a word is being used doesn't tell us a lot here.
biological death exists regardless of our medical and legal terms.
Does it, though? All I can find is descriptions like this one: "Biological death marks the definitive endpoint of an organism’s life, representing the irreversible cessation of all biological functions. This profound transition signifies a state where [...]"
Which leads me to believe it's a point in time. Not a "thing" that "exists". All I can see is how life exists. And we can't really talk just about the absence of life as per your initial post. Because we all transitioned from not being alive to living. That happens when we're born. I think what you were referring to is more an abstract process within a complex biological organism. And the specific effects on one particular organ. That of course exists. But even that is more of an abstract concept, made up of a plethora of real things happen.
i apologize but i'm not following. a biological organism will eventually cease to exist regardless of our medical and legal terms or our abstract and subjective beliefs. we did transition from not being alive to being alive, but never being alive to not being alive. you can come into existence in a different way you go out and the processes can be different as well. non-existence isn't death. death is the process of transitioning from existence to non-existence.
I think so as well. I guess I'm more reluctant to accept how people casually talk about "death" as if it was clear what that means. When reality it's many processes simultaneously in a complex organism. I don't think "near-death experience" is anything meaningful to begin with, since we're talking about a broad, abstract concept of dying. We'd need to talk specifics, like visual hallucinations on cell death in brain tissue. Or when it's deprived of oxygen. We can talk about if this vague process can be interrupted, but details really matter. And we can't confuse the process with the result. I think some people confuse these things.
i completely understand. you make good points. a lot of people do confuse clinical and biological death and equate them or rather don't bother to separate. death isn't necessarily a precise moment but i would argue there has to be an exact point it becomes permanent. whatever that is and however it happens is the process referred to as death, and it is irreversible as we know it.
Yes. That's still vague, though. I think we're talking about brain death in specific. And a point where two things have happened. Firstly a system collapse within the cerebrum (or whatever that part of the brain is called), and enough cell damage so it's irrecoverable. At least that's what I think it is. I guess what I was trying to say before: These things are what actually happens in reality. "Brain death" is more the abstract concept describing these real things having happened.
I'm not a philosopher but I guess we have people confuse more things. Ultimately most people discuss these things to find some kind if afterlife which attributes meaning to life. But isn't that confusing meaning with existence? Biological processes do exist. I don't think they necessarily have a "meaning" though. They just happen. And it's not that easy to conclude meaning from things happening.
And then I'm not sure if we even have ways to tell. Other than hindsight. Even just the brain is very complex and made up of different subsystems. As far as I know only parts of it can be damaged, leaving someone in an permanent coma without any upper brain activity, yet the basic functions still make their heart etc work. I think it's fairly arbitrary if we call them dead or not dead, if we attribute the moment of death before or after their basic life signs cease as well. And there's the added difficulty we have limited ways to look inside. And does one more dead synapse mean they've transitioned state to being dead? Do a few hundred? I don't think there's answers to that, so we're stuck with a conservative definition of a concept.
no there isn’t lol. death is irreversible in all circumstances as we currently understand it and without human intervention. you are describing what i already mentioned—us not having the ability to medically detect the smallest traces of what makes life function. clearly, death did not occur or the heart could not be restored.
Death isn’t an abstract concept or religious rite, it’s a very real legal state that a human can be in, with a formal definition is something that has been minutely debated through centuries of medicine, law, and legislation. It has very real effects on humans, like who is allowed to make legal decisions on behalf of the human in question, or where that human’s body is allowed to be. To me, it seems you have decided that you have a new standard for death you would like to propose that better aligns with your religious beliefs, but I think it would be impractical to reorganize hospitals, law offices, courts, case law, medical research and so on because it advances your point that death is final.
And candidly, I think it is much more challenging to a theistic worldview to argue that raising people from the dead isn’t miraculous because it coming back from the dead happens quite often, than it is to argue that it isn’t miraculous because it doesn’t ever happen. The Fatimah Sun miracle doesn’t matter, because that’s what everyone experiences when they stare at the sun too long; you just shouldn’t do it because it’s super bad for you.
Being an atheist means choosing your beliefs as a logical extension of reality as we observe it, rather than choosing a set of beliefs and reinterpreting reality to match our beliefs. The science says people die and come back to life. We should update our beliefs to match that.
what the actual hell are you talking about lol
you are comparing the legal and medical definition of death to the actual biological experience of death. i know a formal definition is challenging to establish, do you know why?????? because we can't 100% guarantee death has occurred when we've determined it has happened. the physical cessation of all function is not reversible nor has it ever been documented to be such, and the Lazarus effect does not establish or even suggest that. the study you are citing uses phrasings like "after death" and "upon death" because it's clinically relevant. they were clinically dead, not biologically. science is unable to guarantee death has occurred when physical cessation is observed.